Throwaway Style is a monthly column dedicated to spotlighting the artists of the Pacific Northwest music scene through the age-old practice of longform feature writing. Whether it’s an influential (or overlooked) band or solo artist from the past, someone currently making waves in their community (or someone overlooked making great music under everybody’s nose), or a brand new act poised to bring the scene into the future; this space celebrates the community of musicians that makes the Pacific Northwest one of a kind, every month from KEXP. 

This month's column features AJ Suede, one of Seattle's hallmark rap artists. Martin Douglas spoke to the DIY rap workaholic about The Duke of Downtempo (his 35th album released in the past eight years) his impressive artistic lineage, growing up in East Harlem (and spending time in Pennsylvania), the circumstances that brought him to Seattle, and the music that has taken him around the Western Hemisphere.

Who really knew what the settler David Denny envisioned for the future when he stipulated that the 74 acres of land he donated to the city of Seattle remain a public space in perpetuity?

In the 98 years since the first buildings were erected there, Seattle Center has been the site of a spate of civic history. The 1962 World’s Fair, of course (featuring the opening of the Space Needle). The public memorial gathering following the tragic loss of Kurt Cobain. The dynamic duo of Shawn Kemp and Gary Payton. The opening of MoPOP. Sue Bird leading the Seattle Storm to four WNBA Championships (a record they currently share with two other teams). Countless Bumbershoots and Bites of Seattle.

It’s easy to take the majesty of the Space Needle—and the sheer history and scale of the Seattle Center campus—for granted when you walk past and through it multiple times a week. So when AJ Suede, who’s been one of Seattle’s best rap artists for most of the eight years he’s lived here, wanted to meet me at The Armory for this feature, it felt like just another day at the office (very literally). I walked across the campus from KEXP to Skillet (a regular lunch choice for yours truly) as the clouds parted for the sun and blocked its rays frequently and without forethought.

It wasn’t until about halfway through our interview—after chatting over a quick lunch and subsequently getting kicked out of the empty area in front of The Center School—that I realized Seattle Center held significance for Suede, who specifically notes that it’s a place near and dear to his heart.

When Suede was toiling away at his craft as a rapper and beatmaker after first landing in Seattle, he worked in this very Armory food court to make ends meet. “Prior to working in Seattle Center,” he says, “I only knew the eccentrics of Seattle; I only knew the eccentric figures of Seattle. I didn’t interact with the day-to-day person. I didn’t get an idea of the diversity.” 

Seattle is a community of bubbles; professional, artistic, political, and otherwise. When you step out of your bubble and experience the city in all its splendor and squalor, that’s when you realize you’re truly at home here.

AJ Suede was born and raised in East Harlem, the historic New York district also known as Spanish Harlem. Historically, it has been a veritable culture hub, especially in terms of its Black and Brown communities. Suede specifically points out “the musical contributions, the fashion contributions, and even more illicit contributions; the street legends.” He references the Black crime film classic Paid in Full (a fictionalized account of the rise and fall of hustlers Azie Faizon, Rich Porter, and Alpo Martinez) and Killa Season (starring Harlem-born cult favorite rapper Cam’Ron, who also had a starring role in Paid in Full). The latter was shot in close quarters to where Suede lived as a kid.

“I wouldn’t want to be born and raised anywhere else,” says Suede. “In the midst of growing up there, I’d assume it’s just like growing up anywhere else, because you have nothing else to compare it to. When I started living in East Stroudsburg, PA, it made me realize how special a place Harlem is.” 

As a result of divine proximity, Suede had a unique upbringing that would directly impact his future as one of underground rap’s diamonds in the rough. In the 2018 song “Time Alone,” he mentioned “growing up around [Kareem] Biggs [Burke] and Dame [Dash],” two members of the principal triad of Roc-A-Fella Records alongside a name you’ve definitely heard of, Jay-Z. It’s impossible to overstate the impact Roc-A-Fella had on East Coast rap between the late ‘90s and the early 2000s—and as someone who could write a book on the label’s history and artists mostly from memory, I enthusiastically encourage you to research the label if you’re unfamiliar.

The hard-nosed, outspoken Damon Dash went to high school with Suede’s parents but was a couple years younger. According to Suede, his mother was close with Kareem “Biggs” Burke’s brother, Bob (known as “Bobalob”). Suede adds, “His two kids were my age, so we were very, very tight with the Burkes.” He recalls going to birthday parties and such; during his youth, he spent plenty of time with the one-time heirs apparent of a hip-hop dynasty. Which, by the mid-2000s, had fallen apart, but that’s another story for another time. 

Suede was also a piece of hip-hop lore through his father. After trying to get him in Toys ‘R’ Us catalogs (“My dad specifically,” says Suede, “I don’t know how much my mom was involved with it”), young Suede was the star of a commercial for rap supergroup Def Squad’s debut album, and his visage was animated as the group’s logo. The trio of Erick Sermon, Redman, and Keith Murray tapped Director X (then known as Lil X) to produce the commercial, and then Suede was part of the music video for Redman’s 1998 single “I’ll Bee Dat.” (An overlooked career highlight buried in the golden age of music videos, “I’ll Bee Dat” was conceptualized as a parody of the world of television through the bygone tradition known as channel surfing. Suede was one of two children in a fictional cereal commercial.)

“It was a crazy experience,” Suede says of his brief run as a child star of screen. Before we move on, he quips, “Erick Sermon still won’t send me any beats, but it’s all good.” 

“In my neighborhood,” Suede says, “We had something called the Boys Club of New York and they had a free, afterschool music program.” It took Suede a while to find his instrument. He started with piano lessons; he couldn’t quite get the hang of drums; he didn’t have the attention span to learn guitar. 

“And then, by the time I was in fifth grade,” says Suede, “they had a program called MET, which stood for Music Electronic Technology. It was run by an older Black brother named Jose [who wore] grills. He was one of us, you know what I’m saying? As I get older, I think about this sometimes.”

Reminiscing about Jose, Suede says he was definitely just a brother in the neighborhood who made beats—definitely firing up weed while doing so—who found a side gig giving his time to kids in his community, teaching them skills that could develop into a hobby that would steer them away from trouble. Or, in the case of Suede, lead them to their calling.

Every Tuesday and Thursday—the former day to just hang out, the latter to learn how to use drum machines, sequencers, and early model Digital Audio Workststations—Suede would show up to MET. It was part of his first exposure to rock music; he fondly remembers watching the DVD from Jay-Z and Linkin Park’s collaborative/mash-up album Collision Course. “Linkin Park is the gateway drug for a lot of kids,” Suede says, noting the California band for being able to reach young people for whom rock music was a foreign language. MET was an element of a perfect storm for Suede to become a musician, being born into hip-hop culture in one of its historically bountiful neighborhoods. 

“I tried everything,” Suede says. “I tried karate, I tried [finding other interests]. And the thing I just kept coming back to was music. I don’t even really know if it was a conscious choice. 

One of the more personal screeds in AJ Suede’s overflowing musical discography is 2020’s “Suede Family History,” where Suede traces his ancestral line back several generations. As is the nature of Suede as an artist, the exchange of information is the most valuable currency, so the brief anecdotes about his elders are tantamount—communists who left the United States to avoid persecution (or worse), immigrants facing the institutional racism of this country which trickles into its very pores. His maternal grandmother was a first-generation American along with her brothers, Hiram and Eric Maristany.

As a teenager, Hiram took photographs of Spanish Harlem (colloquially known at the time as El Barrio, which translates to “the neighborhood”), some of which were famously featured in the Dupont (now NBC) program Show of the Week in an episode called “Manhattan Underground” and published in the New York Times Magazine. He was also a founding member of the Young Lords Organization and the group’s official photographer, his membership alongside those of Felipe Luciano (also a member of the Last Poets) and divisive television personality Geraldo Riviera. The Young Lords were a human rights collective, for the uninitiated. It’s an oversimplification to compare them directly to the Black Panthers, but that description is somewhere in the ballpark. 

Eric Maristany was also a celebrated photographer; among his credits is Suzanne Vega’s first headshot. According to Suede, Eric took a photo of Malcolm X’s assassination—”From what I understood, the story goes that he had gotten a good photo… not really trying”—while taking photos of the event that was supposed to have taken place. (“Obviously nobody could have predicted [the assassination],” says Suede.) Legend has it that Eric sold the photo for a paltry $50 to TIME Magazine, which then opined that X’s “gospel was hatred” along with the reporting of his murder. (Adding insult to catastrophic injury, if I can be allowed to editorialize.)

Suede understands why his uncle Eric took the $50 payout from TIME. “My family was so poor that that was a come-up at the time. Especially in 1965.”

Making art was in Suede’s blood, forged in his ancestral identity. He says about his family connection, “I had no choice but to do this shit, literally.”

But how did AJ Suede actually become AJ Suede? He began dabbling in rap when he was 12 years old. “I was in seventh grade when I first started making beats, because my uncle Ski and all his homies used to rap in their garage. They converted their garage into a studio.” Even at his young age, they trusted him to record the sessions on a program called Cakewalk Music Creator—and eventually gave him the CD-ROM with the identification key so he could use it on his own.

Fast-forward a bit to high school: When Suede was in ninth grade, he was kicking it a lot with his cousins; his uncle Ski’s sons. Suede had designs to be the Pharrell to their Clipse—which is to say, to be the producer who brings out the best in the tandem of biological brothers. Suede describes his cousins as fly—”those two super flashy; every pair of Jordans, every pair of Dunks”—and felt, with his production and guidance, the three of them could find some success in rap.

“Long story short,” Suede says, “They didn’t take it as serious as me. They didn’t necessarily have a lot for making music the way I love making music.” 

Undeterred, Suede recorded his first solo mixtape, sold it around school, made 70 dollars, “and I ran to Canal Street and I bought myself a fake BAPE hoodie.” Because what else are you gonna do as a 14-year-old kid flush with your first handful of rap money? Donate it to Greenpeace? Might as well buy a bootleg of a streetwear classic, the one with the shark teeth that allows you to zip the hood closed over your face. 

After a couple years of Suede, in his words, “feeling the pressures of [his] environment,” his old family acquaintance Dame Dash—not too far removed from a falling out with Jay-Z which broke up the Roc-A-Fella empire—started a new multimedia venture, DD172. In its brief lifespan, the label arm of DD172 released Curren$y’s Pilot Talk, a breakthrough for the talented New Orleans MC. (Curren$y later sued Dash for releasing his music without permission, just to state for the record.) Pilot Talk, produced by Ski Beatz (who has a long list of production credits but is perhaps most notable for making the beats for Jay-Z’s singles “Dead Presidents II” and “Streets is Watching,” in addition to to Camp Lo’s masterpiece Uptown Saturday Night in full) inspired Suede to dive back into his art.

Around this time, during a period of following his friends’ whims rather than his own artistic impulses, he was at risk of going down a path nobody wanted for him. It was mutually decided that Suede would move to Pennsylvania for a while. He says, “Because of that, I was very focused. The pace from New York to Pennsylvania dramatically slowed down. It was really just school and maybe an after-school activity [that were my main responsibilities], so I was able to lock in on the music.”

Suede took time to hone his craft and occasionally rapped with “some cool people around me,” but just like his cousins, they didn’t have the same obsession with making music. Suede started listening to a rapper named Charles Hamilton—whose aesthetic signifiers were pink headphones and the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise—which gave him a clear path to individualistic expression. “He’s from Harlem,” Suede says of Hamilton, “but Harlem was still very much a street music joint. He went to [Fredrick Douglass Academy] and everything; that’s a school on 145th [Street], in the middle of the hood, you know what I’m saying?” 

Charles Hamilton was an avatar that showed Suede he could infuse what he calls his “nerd influences” with ill rhymes that even the toughest rap fans could get down with. Suede acknowledges that MF DOOM is the platonic ideal of the nerd rapper/god-tier MC dichotomy, but he didn’t discover DOOM until a few years later.

Suede graduated high school and attempted to enter the workforce. It left him unsatisfied. He was not content to settle into some working-class life that was expected of him. He wanted to be a rap artist. So, he says, “I just locked in even harder and just decided I was going to give [music] my everything.” 

In his late teens, Suede went back to New York, but to Williamsburg, Brooklyn instead of East Harlem. He was dwelling in DIY spaces like 285 Kent and was a huge fan of the blurry, ambient-leaning style of hip-hop called “cloud rap.” He made a sample-free album on a keyboard and called it Lefthanded Virgo, which was released on the Bandcamp of the clothing label Mishka. “I can’t necessarily say that it took off the way I thought [it would],” Suede says in hindsight about Lefthanded Virgo. “I was still young enough that I wasn’t managing my expectations realistically, which is a thing I think you need to do in this position. Obviously, people loved it. But I thought this was going to be the thing that got me out of there.”

Suede’s road from “there” to “here”—not necessarily in physical terms, but rather, regarding becoming respected in his field—was a long and winding one. And, truth be told, some of it was physical. In 2015, he worked for a vaccine manufacturing company; sanitizing labs on the clock while rapping in his off hours. He had plenty of time to make music and his bills were paid. By chance, he became acquainted with a listener of his, a peer in music, who would eventually become one of his closest friends. That person goes by the moniker of Wolftone.

Wolf—who is also no stranger to this column—and his roommate at the time invited Suede to perform at a couple of shows they were throwing at their house (at a time when Seattle’s DIY house venue network was thriving), and really, just to hang out for a bit. “I [was] doing well on the internet, but I really wanted to bring the URL to the IRL,” says Suede. He was game to fly out to Seattle. He quit his job cleaning labs and made money by means I’ll decline to divulge here. 

Having saved a couple thousand dollars, Suede came out to Seattle, made connections, networked, went back to New York, worked temp jobs, and saved up more money. He was certain he was going to move to Los Angeles. Says Suede, “This was the SoundCloud era. Some of the homies were doing well, some of them were going to L.A. to chase the dream. You know, some of them did good things, some of them did bad things. Certain things happened where certain people got in trouble in L.A. Still in trouble. I was just like, ‘Yo, I can’t really get caught up in L.A.’ That ate some people alive.” 

So Suede ended up coming out to Seattle and staying indefinitely. That was nearly eight years ago.

Even though it’s tough to know if even Suede himself would have considered himself a full-fledged Seattleite when 2017’s Gotham Fortress dropped, but for the purposes of this narrative, the album Suede considers the starting point of his massive discography is the clear-cut jumpoff point of his run as a Seattle-based artist. With the vast majority of the album produced by Wolftone, there is a stylistic cohesion that slots nicely with another Seattle rap classic of the era, DoNormaal’s stirring Third Daughter. (DoNormaal also guests on Gotham Fortress.)

Wolf and Suede would chill together every day, whether they were making music or not. DoNormaal and Rave Holly would come through to hang out and end up recording verses for the album. When Gotham Fortress was complete, Coeur d’Alene, ID-based Blackhouse Records pressed up tapes, and their transparency led Suede to learn aspects of the business side of the music business; things which allowed him to self-release physical copies of his own music. 

Then came the earliest installments of the famed Darth Sueder series. At first, supported in small part by Wolftone and Seattle’s Khrist Koopa on the beats and later entirely self-produced, Darth Sueder was a proving ground for Suede to try a few styles on for size and see what fits. “During Gotham Fortress [and its recording process],” says Suede about the two-dozen projects he released between 2018 and 2022 (which include all seven volumes of Darth Sueder), “that [was was recorded on] Wolftone’s equipment. I could record, [but it had to be] on Wolf’s schedule. It’s a good barrier for me, and I’m going to get back to it. When I had stable housing, I went to the Guitar Center—that’s not there anymore—[near] South Lake Union with 500 bucks. Got my interface and my speakers and my mic and everything. [I had] no barrier.” 

Working day jobs just enough to pay his bills, Suede finally had the means to dive into his music without distractions. In that first year of the Sith lord coming out of Suede, all his free time was spent making music. 

As the Darth Sueder series progressed, his musical influences were coming out in samples as varied as Portishead, Built to Spill, Sneaker Pimps, Tamaryn, as well as an array of crate-dug soul, funk, psych, and even more outré sources. His rap style was teeming with vignettes of grey Northwest skies and cross-country flights; of centuries-old theology and five-percenter wisdom; of IGN-grade video game references. 

Outside of DS-DSVII, Suede collaborated on full-length projects with outside producers like Philadelphia’s Small Professor (on 2022’s great Hundred Year Darkness), Brooklyn journeyman steel tipped dove (2023’s Reoccurring Characters), and Portland’s psych-rap giant Televangel on two albums (Suede calls their 2022 collaboration Parthian Shots “the real breakout moment” for him). But his favorite projects (and, admittedly, mine too) are the self-produced/mixed/mastered albums from the past two-and-a-half years. Oil on Canvas (Summer ‘22), Ark Flashington (Summer ‘23), and January’s The Duke of Downtempo. “It ain’t even about the bars,” says Suede, “it’s about making the greatest music.” 

The secret about AJ Suede is that he’s a pretty great rapper, but he’s also a truly singular producer. He blends every element of his artistic prowess—he creates the majority of his album covers; he taught himself how to shoot his own music videos during pandemic lockdown—into the AJ Suederverse (the complete oeuvre of his recorded work); each element slots nicely into the full presentation. So it makes sense that his production flawlessly complements his rapping and vice versa. There’s the languid “Suede Yacht” featuring R.A.P. Ferreira (from 2020’s Knowhatimean?), a precursor to their duo G’s Us and 2023’s WHAT THEM DOGS DON’T KNOW THEY KNOW. There’s the lush “1000 Island” (from 2023’s Indica Music). There’s the gorgeous, floating trumpet line of 2023’s “Radiation” (from the aforementioned Ark Flashington). 

“It’s all about chiseling the concrete block,” Suede says about his creative process. “There are some artists that I know who are really good with planning an album. I want to try to do that. But for me, it [hasn’t] really been that everything is a controlled experiment. Everything [in my catalog so far] is just seeing what I get [out of the process].” 

The exploration is the most rewarding part of making albums for Suede. He mentions the surprise factor of experimenting and coming up with something cool. Ever since giving himself to the process of creating after buying his equipment from the old Uptown Guitar Center, he still finds great joy in feeling around for gold. His process changes every time he records a project, and because of that, his music never sounds rote or redundant. 

The title of his latest opus, (the 19-minute) The Duke of Downtempo, stems from a line he spits on “Blind Driver” (featuring the dazzling talents of stalwart underground kings ShrapKnel). “I’m not the king of the slow music,” says Suede, who says people have been favoring his slow flow for years, “but I’m knighted. I done had some people who are very well-known within that genre—who made some of my favorite albums—give me a quick nod.” 

On Downtempo, Suede’s… uh, umpteenth album since relocating to Seattle, you receive what is advertised: rhymes penned by craftsmen (Suede, Curly Castro, Premrock, fellow Throwaway Style All-Star Milc) over sometimes balletic, sometimes haunting beats hovering in the 70-85 BPM range (with a few faster joints, for variety’s sake). “Ancient Mew” is a clear highlight off the bat, with its muted melody augmented by bleating honks of baritone sax. Suede’s consistency can sometimes be his albatross (there is a downside to being reliably great—greatness becomes standard or “regular”), but The Duke of Downtempo is remarkable in both its breadth and brevity. If you find Suede’s lengthy catalog daunting—if the curse of variety causes you to not know where to start—The Duke of Downtempo is one of his two or three very best works. 

Much like its predecessor, last year’s Wolftone-produced Permafrost Discoveries, Bristol flows through the undercurrent of Downtempo. When I suggest these albums provide a reimagining of a dope Bristol rapper, Suede makes sure to point out that the British city already has dope rappers: Eldon Somers, Birthmark, and the Cold Light collective as a whole. 

But he does concede that part of the aesthetic of Downtempo comes from its cover image; a photograph by Justin Rose, capturing Suede blurry in mid-movement. When Suede self-produces a project, he generally takes over every aspect of the production himself, from conception to paying for physical manufacturing and everything in between. Downtempo’s artwork was an exception because Rose’s image was so gripping, immediately leading Suede to think of the similarly warped photo that graces the cover for Portishead’s debut LP Dummy (hello again, Bristol). 

It comes as no surprise when Suede reveals that Permafrost Discoveries and The Duke of Downtempo were conceived as a direct result of Suede visiting Bristol. “While I was up in the UK and the EU, I was exposed to a lot of different music; especially in Bristol. The homie Dean runs a record shop, so I’m [being] gifted Tricky’s autobiography and shown other downtempo beats,” Suede says. He speaks fondly of buddies playing their recommendations on the record player on the spot—and him later making playlists of those songs to take in while at the airport. 

If there is anything you should know about the work ethic of AJ Suede, it’s that by the time one album comes out, he’s most of the way finished with the next thing. “I started The Duke about a year ago,” Suede tells me as we wrap up our conversation at The Armory. “But in the process, when I got back from Europe for the first time, I bought a keyboard with a drum pad connected to it. I’ve been working on a sample-free album. There [are] one or two tracks where it’s like, I’m not even thinking in terms of rap when [I made] these joints. I got joints inspired by Burial; I got joints inspired by Four Tet. Just because these are influences I [have] always [had] that I’ve never been able to lean into.

“When I got the keyboard, I started trying to teach myself the circle of fifths and relearn chord progressions, which is a double-edged sword, right? Because I was just reading something the other day that RZA’s beats got bad when he learned [music] theory [laughter]. But I think this sample-free album sounds very, very good.”

In addition to being talented, endowed by his elders with a creative spirit, having a substantial work ethic and a sharp intellectual curiosity, AJ Suede is a seeker. He travels, he studies, he has conversations; all in the pursuit of knowledge and refracting that knowledge into his art and the business behind it. By sidestepping the notion of becoming a local celebrity, Suede has become one of the flagbearers of Northwest underground rap. 

He says, “I learned from doing; reading every spreadsheet, asking every question, stealing advice, soaking up game, and just being willing to learn and willing to say I don’t know it all. And trying to constantly surround myself with people who know more.”

Throwaway Style’s Pacific Northwest Albums Roundup

Something Something Brax - Cazadero Sketch Book

If you’ve been looking for someone to fill the void left from the dissolution of the West Coast’s most idiosyncratic rap collective, the famed Project Blowed, look no further than Something Something Brax. His debut, Sunshine & Lollipops, was a dark horse for 2022 Rap Album of the Year; full of peak pandemic dread, clinical depression, and enough wisecracks to make you forget its protagonist was mired in a pretty dark period. Brax’s second album is full of labyrinth pop culture references, discursive tangents (so discursive, that “I Said Juvi But I Meant Psicosis” is a titular correction of the 90s lucha libre lyric in the song), humor, heart, and enough self-awareness to make you think he’s putting in two sessions a week with his therapist. 

Shaina Shepherd - JAMUARY

I am fully convinced; there is nobody walking the streets of Seattle that can tell me there’s a singer located in this city better than Shaina Shepherd. Not only can she sing her ass off, but she can do so in every style you put in front of her—rock, soul, blues; I’m sure she could sing a Patsy Cline cover that would bring you to your knees. JAMUARY contains the highlights from demos Shepherd recorded throughout the month of January 2025; one every day. “drink water. stay petty.” is a club jam complete with booming bass and a rap-like flow; “on parade” is a chronicle of an encroaching police state; “DEI” sounds a little like late-period Missy Elliot collaborating with Doechii. Experimentation is the word of the 31 days of JAMUARY, and the city’s greatest singer stepping out of her comfort zone to try new things bodes well for the rest of the year. 

Milc & Televangel - Things to Do in Portland When You’re Dead

Talk about serendipitous timing: These frequent collaborators (and two of Portland rap’s leading lights) literally just surprise-released this album yesterday. The superduo reportedly recorded this seven-song EP in two evenings, and the spontaneity suits them very well. As noted in his Throwaway Style feature, master freestyler Milc has no problem jotting down quality verses in the time it takes a lot of rappers to stop scrolling Instagram and open their Notes app. As for Televangel, this may be his most immediate set of beats yet; and as spectacular as his ear for high quality soundscapes can be, sometimes firing off a drum rhythm over a dope chop-and-loop satisfies the most primal part of a rap fan’s brain. The chemistry between Milc and Televangel at this point is so solid that their low-stakes, two-day recording sessions sound better and more fun than a lot of rappers’ most labored-over efforts.

LATE PASS: TeZATalks - BLACK GIRL AMERICAN HORROR STORY

You know how every now and again, I write about the pleasure of running a local music column as long as I have, ruminating on the pleasures of getting to track an artist’s development in real-time? The transformation of TeZATalks—from a young woman striving to find her niche in an overcrowded Seattle music scene to burgeoning Black goth icon—has been remarkable to witness. At a sprawling 18 tracks, BLACK GIRL AMERICAN HORROR STORY is surely an epic. It’s aggressive horrorcore mixed with Evanescence-styled mall goth mixed with Halloween house mixed with 808 pop-punk mixed with deep-ocean sad-pop. After years and years on the scene, Teza took everything she had inside of her and splashed it on the canvas on her debut album. And even though you could make the argument that she is potentially doing too much to truly find herself as an artist here, a lot of BLACK GIRL AMERICAN HORROR STORY is very good, and parts of it are strikingly original. As a map for the future of her career, Teza has given herself about a dozen different roads to take. If anything, her sheer ambition on this album should be applauded.